Painting Pictures Of The Past

It can be difficult to look at bits of iron or pottery in a muddy trench and imagine how they would have looked when they were first made. Time Team use pictures to help us understand how areas, buildings, objects or people might have been made and used.

Victor's been working with Time Team for about 11 years. He's also illustrated over 250 books!

Some of these pictures are created and animated on computers while others are drawn the old-fashioned way with paper, pencils and paints.

Victor Ambrus is an historical artist. He's illustrated over 250 books, for children and adults. Victor draws pictures of the way life used to be; back when people lived and worked at the sites Time Team digs up.

On this dig, Victor enjoyed the sunshine in a far corner of the field while he worked.

How do you go about drawing your pictures Victor?

"Basically I listen to whatever the archaeologists have to say about the site, and I keep an eye on the trenches to see what's developing and what's coming up. I usually do quite a few drawings as things happen and usually end up with a bigger picture of what went on.

The drawings are then used in the programmes, nearly always. The interesting thing from my point of view is that anything could happen on Time Team, so I could be doing prehistoric one week and I could be doing something medieval the next."

Can you see Victor's picture taking shape? Once he's finished, this picture will probably appear on the Time Team programme.

"One of the ones we did quite recently was a second World War bomber, so you couldn't get bigger extremes…. Two American bombers had crashed near Preston and we had to dig them out of the mud, literally, which was quite a job. It's always interesting because you're doing something completely different."

How long does it take you to produce a picture like the one you have here?

"I started on this yesterday morning and this is how far I've got and it's nearly lunchtime today - it's nearing the end, unless they discover something I didn't know about!

The interesting thing here is that they've got pits with pottery and bones in it. That is, they haven't found any here yet, but there was a site about a mile away which one of our archaeologists dug.

These are things they've found and they're likely to find here as well, so I'm basically putting the people together with the story, that's what's been happening here."

(All photos © 24 Hour Museum unless otherwise stated.)